On 2 February 2018 at 16:35, William Park via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
You should be comparing Swift (iOS) with Ketlin (Android). I'm leaning towards Ketlin, just I can't afford Apple. We'll see what Google will do with Go.
Seems to me that these represent somewhat different courses... Swift and Ketlin are primarily targeted at deploying frameworks for deploying mobile applications on iOS and Android devices. That's a meaningful set of purposes, but that's enormously different from the deployment of server applications. Go has gotten particularly popular for server application deployment in the form of the Docker infrastructure where the typical user of Docker has little reason to actually care what language Docker was written in, just that it works decently well. Myles' example upthread is a pretty good example of what Go is good at; in a page or two of code, he produced an application (that I observe does NOT have zillions of framework dependencies) that is reasonably terse, reasonably easy to understand even if you don't know Go, and which does a useful task without needing a huge amount of boilerplate code. The examples DCB has presented recently fit into the same category; it sounds to me like Go made it reasonably easy to build terse apps that didn't involve thousands of lines of references to framework dependencies and such. We've got some small projects getting deployed in Go at my work; I should probably consider redoing some things I wrote in C in Go, in the hopes that it's easier to deploy. (That said, the latest thing in C has actually served its purpose, and likely doesn't get run again :-( ) The other language that I'd find it interesting to compare, to this end, would be Rust. It has some "easy library inclusion" helpers, and a decent set of decently maintained libraries. I imagine that "cryptocoinmarketcap.rs" (Myles' app, in Rust) would be pretty near in size to the ~50 lines in Go and Python. I'll observe that Graydon Hoare, creator of Rust, is now working at Apple, on Swift. <https://github.com/graydon> So there's plenty of "full circle" to be found :-) -- When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"